Research approach

The overall strategy of the work plan is to organise the activities through agile cycles of design, development, implementation and evaluation of the wide range of interventions to improve air quality and obtain climate change co-benefits proposed in iSCAPE.

During the project 9 work packages (WP) will be active. First, a thorough and neutral assessment of existing and future challenges and opportunities for the cities with respect to air quality and climate change, and the role of infrastructural interventions to offer solutions to the corresponding challenges will be carried out (WP1). Once the possible solutions will be identified, a dialogue with the citizens of each test city and relevant stakeholder will be initiated through Living Labs as part of WP2 to assess non-technical challenges to implementation of both the physical (WP3) and behavioural interventions (WP4) that will be deployed and/or assessed in iSCAPE. The project will also see the development of a low-cost and of a high-end air quality monitoring kits (WP3) which will be used to assess the effectiveness of the implemented solutions to improve air quality (high-level monitorting kit) and also to educate citizens (low-cost monitoring kit) as part of the Citizen Science activities which will be hosted at the Living Labs.

As the deployment of Passive Control Systems planned as part of WP3 will involve an alteration of the natural air flow in the city to improve air quality, an accurate design and evaluation campaign will be necessary to assess the effectiveness of these solutions for different climatic conditions related to location and seasonality. As such, iSCAPE will run in parallel air quality and meteorological simulations at various scales to pre-empt the effects and improve the impacts of these solutions as part of WP6 and an extensive monitoring to assess the effectiveness of such solutions as part of WP5. As the focus of iSCAPE is not only the assessment of these physical interventions but also to preempt the impacts of air quality related policies and directives on the air pollution at urban scale, simulations of this family of interventions which have a direct impact on population behaviour will be carried out as part of WP4. This work package will also give a bottom-up feedback to policy makers by linking anthropogenic urban activities to environmental models for providing new insights on how traffic policy measures need to be designed to improve environmental quality.

The research and development in work packages 1-6 will be supported by three cross-cutting WPs. WP7 will examine the strategies needed for overall transition to successful exploitation and policy instruments and priorities. WP8 will integrate the results of all the work packages for the dissemination and communication process. Finally, iSCAPE will be coordinated and managed effectively to ensure that the project meets its milestones on time and on budget (WP9).